In the kitchen, hygiene is key. Experts recommend being very careful when handling raw foods or using any utensils during their preparation. Otherwise, we expose ourselves to cross-contamination, a process by which microbes or other foreign substances, such as allergens, are unintentionally transferred from one food or object to another food, with harmful effects on health.
Food technologists always emphasize raw foods, cutting boards or knives. However, spice jars can contain a lot of germs, more than the lids of your kitchen trash can, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Food Protection and promoted by the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Our research shows that any spice jar you touch when preparing raw meat could become cross-contaminated,” says the professor in the Department of Food Sciences at the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences and co-author of the study in collaboration with colleagues at North Carolina State University, Donald Schaffner. He maintains that these containers can easily become contaminated with microorganisms dangerous to health.
The researchers monitored the behavior of 371 adults cooking an identical turkey burger recipe in kitchens of various sizes. To simulate the movement of a pathogen in a kitchen, they inoculated the meat in advance with a bacteriophage known as MS2 to serve as a safe marker. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, but do not have any negative health effects.
Participants were not informed that their food safety behaviors would be examined until after they had prepared the burgers. Once the food was ready, the researchers took samples of utensils, cleaning areas and kitchen surfaces to detect the presence of the MS2 marker.
After observing the preparation routine, the authors sampled some new categories of surfaces, such as spice containers and sink faucet handles.
And what did they find? The most frequently contaminated objects were spice containers, with around 48% of samples showing evidence of MS2 contamination. The presence of bacteriophages was much higher than that of other kitchen items, such as cutting boards and trash can lids. The least contaminated objects were faucet handles.
“Most research on cross-contamination of kitchen surfaces has focused on kitchen cutting boards or faucet handles and has neglected surfaces such as spice containers, trash can lids, and other utensils.” . This makes this study and similar works by members of this group more complete than previous ones,” concludes Schaffner.
